Filed under: Trends
Everyday we get asked the question of what makes Twitter so interesting. It’s true that at its conception, Twitter was simply a personal status updater. But this is not the most powerful aspect of Twitter. In the above video, Twitter founder Evan Williams talks about how the community has taken this very simple platform and turned it into something that even its founders couldn’t have predicted. To Twitter’s credit, they have embraced this community-led charge to define their service offering. This is what makes Twitter one of the more powerful communications platforms. This trend of consumer customization is what makes working in this space so exciting.
This is one conference that we just couldn’t pass up. South by South West Interactive has grown to be the premier destination to bring together “the brightest minds in emerging technology.” This festival in Austin, Texas brings together people from all walks of interactive life. We’ll be attending sessions on mobile, design, measurement, creativity, branded entertainment and interactivity.
Notable keynotes that we’re looking forward to are by Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine, Guy Kawasaki from AllTop and Jeffery Kalmikoff from Threadless. But fear not, we won’t be stuck in a conference centre all week, we’ve secured invites to parties thrown by our friends at Facebook, Mashable and Media Temple.
If everything goes according to plan, we’ll return to Vancouver with a head full of knowledge and inspiration that will help drive our client’s business in new and exciting directions.
Upon our return, we’ll be conducting a series of lab sessions to share our experiences and key learning’s with the rest of the agency. We’ll be sharing more of our experience with you soon.
Just under a year ago Chris Anderson wrote a piece for Wired magazine entitled Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. In the article he cites some examples of brands who in the past have given away a portion of their product offering in order to monetize another part of their offering. The classic example is of Gillette who invented the disposable blade. Give the blade away for free in order sell more actual razors. Anderson’s theories are well researched and provide many examples, but it wasn’t until Monty Python revealed their marketing strategy that these theories have been brought to life through a YouTube channel. The much beloved comedy troupe of Monty Python began to release all their content online through their YouTube channel. Through this effort the sales of their DVDs have risen over 23,000%. With numbers like this Anderson’s theories are becoming more of a legitimate business case.
At the same time as Monty Python released this story, we saw that Twitter was able to raise $50 million in financing without showing any profit. Twitter is giving their wildly popular service away for free, for now, but they are secretly experimenting with new ways to monetize their growing audience. If Twitter feels comfortable turning down a $500 million take-out bid by Facebook then you can be assured they are planning something bigger than just selling ad space.
Filed under: Thoughts
Yesterday Matthew and BJ lead the agency through a comprehensive Twitter tutorial. Over the past few months Twitter has grown into a comprehensive communications tool. It was interesting to watch the Common Craft Twitter in Plain English tutorial. A year and a half later, thanks to apps like Tweet Deck and TwitterFon, Twitter has grown into so much more than simply micro-blogging your thoughts. Examples of Mumbai and the Hudson River American Airlines crash shows us that Twitter is the quickest communication tool out there.
In the spirit of #folllowfridays we suggest following these Twitters on our team:
@jameschutter, @tconlin, @kumii, @bjfresh and @blainepearson.
See you in the Twittersphere or in person at the TwestivalYVR.
Filed under: Uncategorized
We are pretty thrilled that the kind people at Six Cent Press are loving the buttons we designed for ourselves last year. They are loving them so much, in fact, that they’ve crowned them button of the month. We are blushing.
Thank you Six Cent Press, we love our buttons too!
Filed under: Introduction
Kumiko Ide joins the Radar team with a strong PR and design background. She’ll be helping us out as a Digital Cultivator.
BJ Vicks will be also helping with the Digital Cultivation and will be lending a particular expertise to the web development side of the business.
Barack Obama will be joining us as the leader of the free world.
Filed under: Recommends
Increasingly, as part of our service offering we’ve been building iPhone and 3G applications for our clients. Building a strategy and creative for these applications obviously requires us to pour over a huge amount of apps. Here’s some that we find particularly useful. A lot of these applications came from reading Noupe’s Top 20 iPhone Apps for Bloggers, Designers and Freelancers.
First and foremost, you have to have the WordPress app so you can fire off blog posts on the bus from your iPhone.
On the same tip you’ll also need Twitterific so you can update your Twitter account in the elevator.
Byline will sync up with your Google Reader so you can keep in touch with your feeds on the go.
You know when you get those great ideas that are coming so fast that you just have to write them down? ShapeWriter allows you draw out the letters without the keyboard so you can get the brainstorm out without fighting the keyboard.
Lastly, PixelPipe helps push content out from your mobile device to all your social media channels like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and a host of other hosting options.
These apps should help you keep onto of your social media game.
P.S. This is the app that is making us super excited for building apps on the Android program.
Filed under: Recommends
Happy Holidays from the whole team here at Radar. Thanks for all the love this year. We’re cooking up some exciting new stuff for ‘09 and can’t wait to work and collaborate with all our clients and suppliers.
Here’s some holiday treats from us to you:
Track Santa on you mobile through google maps.
Check up on Santa through Twitter.
Then kick back and watch some classic holiday YouTube videos.
Filed under: Updates
Now in it’s third year Share DDB, our annual charity art auction, was an overwhelming success. It works like this: everyone from the agency submits something that they’ve made, we host a party, have a big auction, have some food and drinks, and hopefully raise a bunch of money for some local organizations in need. From fine art photography to a voodoo doll to vintage records, there was no limit to the creativity this year. The agency, our clients, spouses and suppliers came out and participated and we were able to raise over $10,000 for the Kettle Friendship Society and the James Lee Foundation. Thanks to the Globe and Mail, Glass City Cafe and CTV for their generous donations and to everyone who helped make the event such a huge success.
See you next year!
Oh yeah we also had a paintball rifle range in the office.
Here at Radar we’ve been spending lots of time lately exploring the wonderful world of Tumblr. What’s Tumblr? Simply put it’s blogging for dummies. It’s an easy to use interface which allows for the simple sharing of video, quotes, audio files, links and video from around the web with others in the form of a blog or personalized theme. It’s perfect for short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts associated with standard blogging. Basically, it’s the ideal platform to share personal creations, content, and experiences with little or no commentary or effort.
Other benefits include:
1. It’s free, simple to use, no hosting is required.
2. The available themes are more aesthetically pleasing than those offered on other platforms. Tumblr’s open source platform allows those comfortable with CSS to customize the look, feel and layout of their content.
3. It’s perfect for those random pieces of content and information that you can’t wait to share with the web. Posting on Tumblr feels much more like sharing content with a community than publishing it. It’s a great way for artists and creative minds to get their content out there to a receptive audience.
4. Finally, like other micro-blogging platforms Tumblr is addictive. Once your account is set up you’ll want to post and post and post.
Some well known Internet personalities that have adopted Tumblr as a platform include: Julia Allison – a famous blogerty – and, Topher Chris a developer who’s collection of Tumble logs under the name I Make Money Not Websites has earned secured his rep as the platforms biggest celebrity.
